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Mashed Eggplant

A roasted eggplant dish mixed with onions, parsley, olive oil, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Mashed Eggplant

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the eggplant

  1. Roast the eggplants over a hot fire until well cooked.

  2. Remove the skin and mash the eggplants with a spoon after chopping them.

Mix and rest

  1. Finely chop the onions and parsley, then mix them with the mashed eggplant.

  2. Season with salt and pepper to taste and let rest for 2 to 3 hours.

Serve

  1. Before serving, drizzle olive oil over the mixture and garnish with a few black olives.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Eggplant + olivetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together943 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. Eggplant + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together328 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  4. Parsley + olivetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,649 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Eggplant + peppertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,123 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggplants
Provide the main body and soft, smoky-flavoured flesh once roasted and mashed.
Olive oil
Adds fat and a smooth, rich mouthfeel to the finished mash.
Onions
Add sharpness and aromatic bite that cuts through the mellow eggplant.

The step that matters

Roast the eggplants until well cooked. Roasting until the flesh is fully soft lets it collapse into a smooth mash and develops smoky, caramelised flavour. Undercooked eggplant stays fibrous and watery, giving a stringy texture.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (eggplant, parsley, olive, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against eggplant, parsley, olive, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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